American Populist Support for Choice in K-12 Education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore why American populists may be attracted to the educational choice. Though populist factions may support either elitist institutions and policies or institutions and policies that promote pluralism in the short term, their motivations and interests over the long term may diverge from elitism and pluralism in important ways. After discussing why some pluralists support a system of educational choice, we describe the populist choice supporters of both the right and the left and a taxonomy of potential reasons for their support. We divide the taxonomy into three groups of reasons populists may have turned against the conventional public education system and turned toward choice: a lack of candor from the public education system; failures to achieve equity in the public system; and technocracy and other limits on the diversity of offerings within the public system. The final section offers a warning to choice-supporting pluralists that, under certain conditions, populist support for choice could wane in the future. That change of opinion could result in more families choosing some form of homeschooling, an abandonment of legislative and policy support for current choice programs, and/or renewed efforts in the culture war – which may have a profound effect on K-12 education policy more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• populism
• education reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We are using the term “public school elites” to encompass both the elite leaders within the American public education system and the elites outside the public education who offer support to this system, as described earlier in the paper.

2. See, for example, this characterization of NAEP as the “gold standard” of assessments by the Massachusetts Department of Education, http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/natl-intl/naep/faq.html?section=overview, retrieved 6/6/2020.

3. Data retrieved from the NAEP Data Explorer, https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/data/.

4. Data retrieved from the Arkansas Department of Education, https://myschoolinfo.arkansas.gov/SRC.

5. There is substantial evidence regarding Americans’ increasing embraces of racial and ethnic diversity (Frey, 2014).

6. Federal funding for public schools is excluded from this calculation by EdChoice, so if these funds were included this percentage would be about 10 percentage points lower.